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Poison pie

Poison pie close up

☠️ This is a great pie to bake for Halloween… or any time you feel witchy! 🧙🏽‍♀️🧙🏽‍♀️ ☠️

I got Malcolm Bird‘s fabulous book “The witch’s handbook” as a Christmas present in 1989 and we enjoyed reading it and making some of the crafty activities, but we never baked much at home, and also most of the ingredients in the cooking section were a bit unusual for Spanish palates, so the cooking recipes were sort of out of reach.

I still liked the book so much that I recently bought a second hand English edition—and it came just in time for Halloween. The best! 🎃

As I browsed through the book, the Poison Pie recipe caught my eye. Why not bake it, now that I feel confident to do so?

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Roasted pumpkin (or butternut squash) seeds

Butternut squash seeds on a pan, golden and cooked

Raw pumpkin and butternut squash seeds are quite unpleasant to eat without cooking. They are too chewy and hard to break down when biting on them, and you end up trying to swallow them whole. Not a good idea when they have a bit of a hard edge if they’re half chewed.

But once you cook them, it makes them nicely brittle and crispy, and it also brings out their deliciousness 😋

Butternut squash seeds in a dish, with pulp on a small pot
Seeds, just scooped out of the squash
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La mocaorà, or Sant Dionís sweets

Sant Dionís sweets - from la Mocaorà - image depicting small colourful sweets shaped like fruits and vegetables

The 9th of October is the Valencian’s Community day, commemorating when King Jaume I conquered the city of Valencia in 1238 and yadda yadda… Of course, the most interesting aspect for us in this blog is the food, and there is a specific type of sweets that are eaten at that time of the year: dolços de Sant Dionís or (pardon my terrible translation) Saint Dionysius sweets.

These are made of almond, sugar and egg white (plus whatever colouring you feel like adding). I used orange and a green colourings, and mixed them in various amounts, depending on which vegetable or fruit I tried to mimic.

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Horchata + tiger nut biscuits = the ideal merienda?

A glass of horchata and a small saucer with two tiger nut biscuits

I went on a tiger nut frenzy last week, as I made a batch of horchata and then I also turned the leftover “pulp” into “flour” for making biscuits. Absolutely ZERO WASTE! I was very pleased.

This time I used just tiger nuts. No cinnamon or lemon zest as in my previous attempt. And it tasted better than ever! So tiger nutty. I find it hard to describe this flavour; you have to try this type of horchata to understand how it tastes—it’s quite unlike Mexican horchata.

My friend and prestigious Horchata Connoisseur Belén has asked me to share the recipe for the biscuits, so here it goes!

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